Audio description of Minoru Nomata: Windscape exhibition wall text.

MINORU NOMATA: WINDSCAPE
21 May - 4 September 2022

The visionary paintings of Minoru Nomata depict imaginary landscapes that transcend time and place. Featuring architectural superstructures and topographical forms devoid of human presence, his uncanny depictions are portals into mysterious and uncertain worlds.
Coming from a family who ran a business dyeing kimono fabrics, Nomata grew up in Tokyo’s industrial district of Meguro during a period of rapid urban and economic growth in Japan. Amidst this evolving landscape, he became fascinated by the structural design of factories, chimneys, and water towers throughout his hometown, which would eventually lead him to create his own architectural depictions. 
Nomata has drawn upon a vast array of references in his work: from elements of Greek and Roman architecture to tropes from Medieval and Renaissance painting; from the machine-age aesthetic of the American ‘precisionist’ painter Charles Sheeler to the ambient musical compositions of Erik Satie and Brian Eno. Underpinning this wide-reaching vocabulary is a continuing search for unseen dimensions within each of the landscapes that he creates, which are as strangely familiar as they are prophetic. While conjured from the artist’s imagination as science-fictional renderings of reality, the worlds that Nomata depicts are always rooted in a familiar visual language, one of collective memory and a shared sense of responsibility for the environments that we inhabit.
For this solo exhibition, Nomata’s first outside of Asia, he has responded to the architecture of our Grade I listed building through a site-specific display that reflects its modernist structure whilst also connecting to its nautical setting. Demarcating the gallery is a series of wooden mast-like display structures connected above by a network of wire support, imitating the forms and sightlines one would encounter whilst navigating a shipyard.
Presented across each mast and the surrounding walls is a selection of works made over the last thirty years, which evidence Nomata’s blending of the industrial with the fantastical, the archaic and the futuristic. Brutalist in beauty, aerodynamic in form and ambient in their atmosphere, Nomata’s landscapes are meditations on an ever-changing world and vehicles to alternative futures.

Audio Description - Minoru Nomata: Windscape

Audio description of RESOLVE Collective: LIDO exhibition wall text.

RESOLVE COLLECTIVE: LIDO
28 May – 4 September 2022

RESOLVE is an interdisciplinary design collective combining architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. Much of their work aims to provide platforms for celebrating local knowledges as well as organising and collaborating in communities. An integral part of this way of working means designing with and for young people and under-represented groups in society. 

This exhibition, titled LIDO, has been conceived as a leisure space for Bexhill, created through research and collaboration with students from Bexhill College and the De La Warr Pavilion’s young people’s group, The Blueprint Collective. Accompanied by RESOLVE, these collaborators embarked on ‘forages’ of Bexhill where they incorporated a broad range of methods, from pre-historic methods of flint knapping to audio walking, as ways of gathering local materials, memories, and architectural forms from Bexhill, led by their knowledge and emotional connections to the area. 

The result is an augmented ‘lido’ for Bexhill, invoking a type of public space that was popularised in many UK coastal towns in the 1930s and are themselves often ‘foraged’ from the sea. LIDO encourages visitors to browse these foraged materials whilst recounting and creating their own local connections, remixing them within a landscaped space for leisure, interaction, and knowledge-sharing over the summer months. 

Merging our exhibition and learning spaces, RESOLVE has created a community destination over the summer. Local groups will be invited to use the space for their own programmes as well as participating in a dynamic public programme curated by the young people and the team at the Pavilion.

LIDO is part of a research collaboration between RESOLVE, Wellcome Collection in London, West Dean College in West Sussex, and the De La Warr Pavilion. The overarching project – ‘What the Wild Things Are’ - surveys the geographical and political-ecological contexts of each site – the urban, the rural and the coastal – working with local young people, material experiments, and archival research to probe what and who is ‘wild’ in these contexts.

Audio Description - RESOLVE Collective: LIDO

Audio description of Zineb Sedira: Can't You See The Sea Changing? exhibition wall text.

Zineb Sedira
Can’t You See the Sea Changing?
24 September 2022 – 8 January 2023

Working across photography, installation and film, Zineb Sedira draws upon her personal history and close connection to Algeria, France and the UK to explore ideas of identity, gender, environment and collective memory. Spanning both of the De La Warr Pavilion’s galleries, Can’t You See the Sea Changing? is Sedira’s first exhibition in a UK public gallery for over twelve years and focuses on her ongoing investigation into the conditions of transnational trade, identity and migrant consciousness in a post-colonial context, within which the sea is a recurring motif.

Throughout her career, Sedira has become a leading voice in addressing the question of what it means to live between different cultures, often bringing together autobiographical narration, fiction and documentary genres. Through her varying approaches to storytelling, Sedira interrogates what she refers to as ‘spaces where mobility expires’, or the (in)ability of individuals to depart, return, escape, or exist in transit between certain lands and identities. Whilst her narratives are embedded with histories of migration and exile, particularly in relation to her home countries of Algeria and France, through her work Sedira considers what it means to be transported through visionary acts of imagination, acts that carry us to different places through the merging of past and present time frames. 

Beginning from Sedira’s fascination with the sea as an enigmatic yet geopolitically charged space, as well as the coastal context of the De La Warr Pavilion, the exhibition spans a period from 2008 to the present day and brings together photography, installation, film and archival material in a constellation of seafaring traces. Images of imposing lighthouses, abandoned shipwrecks, and eroded rocks are layered with the memories, daily experiences and tragic deaths of those who have moved across surrounding seas. By highlighting these human narratives in her work, Sedira builds an oceanic archive that unearths stories of migration and movement that would otherwise remain invisible, whilst demonstrating the power of images to reconstruct our understanding of history. Through the artist’s analytical eye, the exhibition draws upon her ongoing exploration of archival processes and the different ‘windows’ or thresholds that they can open up. 

Can’t You See the Sea Changing?  is a collaboration between De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, and Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), where the exhibition will be presented in spring 2023.

Audio Description - Zineb Sedira: Can't You See The Sea Changing?

Peace and Goodwill
Soundscape for Radiator Arts winter lantern installation at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea; December 2022.
by Mary Hooper
7 minutes and 17 seconds on a loop 

This soundscape is composed of layers of different recordings and samples that the artist has made herself and collected over five years.
For this 2022 Christmas, or Winter Solstice, installation Hooper wanted to include as many voices and languages as she could at short notice saying ‘peace and goodwill’.There are many tragedies unfolding in every country globally and never before has it been so important to remember that we are all kin under the skin.

A call out for phone voice recordings saying ‘peace and goodwill’,  resulted in 36 voices in many languages collected in just one week, which  have been edited and set into the soundscape.

Thank you to all of those voices, some local and some from our global community. The Redbird Youth collective from Galway in Ireland recorded their voices  with the help of sound Artist Anne-Marie Deacy, who the artist collaborated with in the summer. An  extract of the experiment with our voices is embedded into the final part of the soundscape, so thanks go to Anne-Marie for the use of that piece.

Peace And Goodwill: Sound installation by Mary Hooper

Audio description of Mohammed Sami: The Point 0 exhibition wall text.

Mohammed Sami: The Point 0
10 June — 28 August 2023

Mohammed Sami (born 1984, Baghdad, Iraq) channels his personal experiences of living in Iraq and later when he immigrated to Sweden into his painting practice. His works exquisitely render abandoned interiors, claustrophobic landscapes, and uncanny depictions of apparently everyday objects. There is a haunting absence of people in these depictions of space and place, the power of which lies as much in what cannot be seen or hovers just beyond the frame.

Sami draws our attention to certain textures, colours, and forms in each of his compositions: an ominous shadow cast over the crumbling façade of a building; the clustered shadows of trees covering a glowing edifice in the background, or an impenetrable wall pushing up against the painting’s foreground. It is within such evocative details that belated memories are triggered and simmer below the surface of the painting. In Sami’s work, time, like memory, is treated and experienced as a flexible material. 

Working directly onto the canvas using a brush, pallet knife, acrylic and spray paint, Sami never takes photographs or makes sketches, instead mining his own experiences from his formative years in Iraq. Yet while his works are freighted with personal memories, they are ambiguous enough to invite multiple associations and readings within each enigmatic composition. 

The Point 0 is Mohammed Sami's first institutional solo exhibition in the UK and is organised by Camden Art Centre in collaboration with De La Warr Pavilion. A previous iteration was exhibited at Camden Art Centre between 27 January – 28 May 2023. This presentation at DLWP features four new large-scale paintings unveiled here for the first time. 

The exhibition is accompanied by the first dedicated monograph on Sami’s paintings, designed by Fraser Muggeridge with essays by Darian Leader and Amy Sherlock. Please visit our shop to purchase a copy.

Mohammed Sami: The Point 0 - Audio Descripition

Audio description of Katie Cuddon: Night Portraits exhibition wall text.

Katie Cuddon: Night Portraits
10 June — 3 September 2023

Katie Cuddon (born 1979, London, UK) is an artist best known for working with clay. Expressive and instinctive, her sculpture explores psychological representations of the human body and the interpenetration of art and life.

Pummelled and masticated clay is worked into a tensile skin, creating forms that are simultaneously anthropomorphic, symbolic, and surreal. Once fired these sculptures are combined with other materials and found objects and enter our space on supports, both found and constructed.

Presenting a series of new works made by Cuddon since becoming a mother in 2018, the exhibition is conceived as an intimate and visceral environment in which unsettling imaginings play out. The title, Night Portraits comes from a group of small works within the exhibition. Here the clay has been intensely worked. It is inscribed with the artist’s teeth, and, exuding candle wax, conjures up the dreamlike quality of the exhibition space. Like Cuddon’s sculptures generally, the works in the exhibition resist a straightforward narrative reading but rather take the viewer on a restless journey of association between our inner and outer worlds.

Created by Cuddon throughout the pandemic, several works dwell on her experiences of isolation within domestic spaces, and the tensions that exist between the internal, intimate sphere of the home, and the hostile threats presented by the outside world and its relentless stream of dark news. This discomfort manifests in the visual quality of the works, with their indentations, holes, and hollow surfaces.

Night Portraits draws upon Cuddon’s recent research into the relationships between clay, writing, death, and the body. This work is pursued with fellowships and research grants from the Leverhulme Trust and Wellcome Trust.

A free booklet is available to accompany the exhibition, featuring a new text by Head of Exhibitions, Joseph Constable. 
All works are courtesy the artist. 

The sculptures in the exhibition are very fragile. Please do not touch and take care when moving through the space.

Katie Cuddon: Night Portraits - Audio Description

Audio description of Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun exhibition wall text.

Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun
23 September 2023 – 14 January 2024

‘Today’s world demands something improvised and participatory. People are able to create things themselves instead of submitting to models. So the artist just has to propose things that people themselves can create.’ – Hélio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica (b. 1937, d. 1980, Rio de Janeiro) is widely considered one of the most prominent Brazilian artists of the twentieth century, with an influence on contemporary artistic practice that extends to today. Oiticica dedicated his life to creating freewheeling, participatory artworks comprising abstract paintings, immersive environments, interactive objects and cinematic experiences that challenge us to engage with our surroundings in new and unexpected ways, stimulating our senses, emotions and physical bodies. At the core of his practice is a drive to move beyond the formal categories of art, such as painting and sculpture, in order to fuse art with life and invite the spectator to become an active participant within each of his works. 

Developed in close collaboration with the Estate of Hélio Oiticica, this exhibition is the first major presentation of the artist’s work in a UK public institution for over 15 years and centres on his life and work from the late 1960s and 70s, encompassing his time spent in London, Sussex, New York, and Rio de Janeiro, before his untimely death aged 42. The exhibition has been organised to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Oiticica’s ground-breaking Cosmococa artworks, first created with fellow artist Neville D’Almeida (b. 1941, Belo Horizonte) in New York in 1973. Transforming the first-floor gallery into a recreation of the artists’ CC5 Hendrix War ‘quasi-cinema’ environment, DLWP joins several international venues in celebrating the rich legacy of these site-specific artworks across the course of this year. 

The Cosmococa environments form part of a wider set of artistic propositions made by Oiticica during this period, which are explored throughout the exhibition across immersive installations, film, archival photography, text and interactive pieces. Grounding these concerns and positioned as a key starting point for this exhibition is the term crelazer or ‘creleisure’ in English, coined by the artist in 1969. Merging ‘creativity’, ‘leisure’ and ‘belief’ (creer in Portuguese), creleisure signifies Oiticica’s desire to reclaim leisure time from its exploitation under capitalism, instead embracing a mode of ‘active laziness’ or ‘radical passivity’ as fundamental to fostering creativity. 

Subversive, heady, and playful, Oiticica’s work invites us to shift our perspective beyond the bounds of everyday experience towards ways in which we might negotiate an increasingly inhospitable world. Taking its title from the artist’s essay ‘The possibilities of Creleisure’ (1969), in which he writes of lying ‘as if waiting for the internal sun, the non-representative leisure’, the exhibition highlights the enduring legacy of this trailblazing and visionary artist.

All works in the exhibition are courtesy of César and Claudio Oiticica. 

Special thanks to Neville D'Almeida, César Oiticica Filho and Ariane Figueiredo.

Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun - Audio Description

Audio description of Manuel Mathieu: The end of Figuration exhibition wall text.

'Apparition is a powerful ‘container’, a sort of transitory state where language fights to survive. It’s a dance between what can and could, the past and the future.' – Manuel Mathieu

Manuel Mathieu (b. 1986, Haiti) is a multidisciplinary artist working with painting, drawing, ceramics, and installation. His work investigates themes of historical violence, erasure and cultural interpretations of the body, nature, and spirituality. Mathieu’s interests are partially informed by his upbringing in Haiti and his experience emigrating to Montréal at the age of 19, creating works that freely operate in between and borrow from numerous historical and artistic influences and traditions.

Mathieu has developed a distinctive abstract visual language that invites us to openly interpret what we might see in a work. Amorphous forms vacillate and dissolve into one another, creating boundless landscapes, or what the artist terms apparitions. The vibrational effect of his work elicits physical and emotional frequencies that offer alternative methods for navigating the world.

The end of figuration is Mathieu’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe and focuses on a series of new paintings and a site-specific fabric installation reaching through the centre of the gallery. The artist’s mixing of mediums across painting, ceramics, and fabric is underpinned by a provocation: how might we conceive the end of figuration within art making, such that we see in a work only what we wish to find? In posing this question, he simultaneously highlights art’s inevitable failure to capture reality alongside its potential to be an illuminating vehicle for processing our past and present experiences.

Manuel Mathieu: The end of figuration
17 February – 27 May 2024

Mathieu’s works can be seen as attempting to represent that which is often unrepresentable – the emotive, intimate, violent, and chaotic energies that charge our everyday; apparitions that crystallise and dissipate in the moments of our looking.

Manuel Mathieu: The end of figuration - Audio Description

Audio description of Clara Jo: Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood exhibition wall text.

Clara Jo: Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood 
17 February – 1 April 2024

Clara Jo (b. 1986, United States) works with film, photography, and installation to re-engage socio-political understandings of the world in ways that entangle the senses. She plays with speculative narratives to offer alternative readings of certain landscapes, examining their material imprints and deep erasures. By reimagining these contexts through her work, Jo questions how these stories can feed into our collective imaginations during moments of crisis.

For her first institutional solo exhibition in the UK, Jo presents the documentary fiction film, Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood. This new film is grounded by documentary footage shot by the artist whilst embedded with a research group from Mauritian Archaeology and Cultural Heritage on location in Albion and Flat Island, Mauritius. In Albion, Jo filmed the excavation and preliminary analysis of human skeletal remains from an unmarked cemetery on a former cotton plantation and sugar estate, as well as footage from Flat Island, an uninhabited islet located twelve kilometres off the north coast of Mauritius. This islet had been used as a 19th-century quarantine and detention station for indentured labour during several waves of the cholera epidemic.

Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood weaves fictive elements through the concrete realities of these ghostly terrains via computer-generated animation drawn from her research within colonial archives in London. In doing so, the work makes visible certain scars that are hidden within these island landscapes and highlights the human capacity to forget the most traumatic parts of our history, privileging sanitised versions of the past in their place.

The film is narrated through the perspective of the Paille-en-queue bird, who has inherited oral histories from their ancestors of all they have witnessed from an aerial perspective. Spanning different elevations and time registers, this avian narrator highlights and commemorates erased and unknown histories from the legacy of British and French colonialism and movements of indentured labour across the Afrasian Sea (Indian Ocean).

Clara Jo: Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood - Audio Description

DLWP In Conversation talks: - guest speakers unpack themes and shared interests in relation to our exhibitions programme.

The De La Warr Pavilion is the centre for contemporary art and Grade One listed modernist icon on the seafront of Bexhill On Sea.

Audio Description - Zineb Sedira: Can't You See The Sea Changing?

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